On Spiritual Exploration, First Reply (Letter 2/6): The Kaleidoscope
An ongoing letter series with Theresa "Sam" Houghton of The Journey Continues
This is the first reply in a Substack letters series with Theresa “Sam” Houghton of The Journey Continues, part 2 of a 6-part discussion entitled “On Spiritual Exploration”. These letters are all about the journey of finding a life path, how winding that journey might be, and how that path has looked for us spiritually.
You can see part 1, her first letter to me, below:
Sam—
To write letters in the digital age! I agree, what a strange and interesting activity to engage in these days. I was excited from the moment you suggested it for that very reason.
While I don't think we'd make piles of cash inventing a social network where folks write long-form letters to each other, maybe that's exactly what the world needs—deeper thought, more deliberate conversation, opportunities to dig down on topics that can't always be easily covered in in-person conversation, much less Twitter.
In fact, some of my earliest tastes of the joy of writing came from writing letters to friends during college. Really long emails, if we're going to be accurate about it (my handwriting has always been atrocious), but emails that took on all the beautiful slow-thought conventions of letter writing, that dug in and explored all the rich learning, growth, and insights that come up when you're that age. It was, of course, a way of connecting deeply with these new friends of mine, so many of whom are now companions for life. But it was also a way of clarifying and articulating my identity, which was in the invigorating and disorienting process of change and evolution as I immersed myself in a beautiful intellectual environment and a vastly larger social world than what I previously experienced in my small-town suburban upbringing.
But the main reason I was excited for this exchange with you, Sam, was for the chance to talk about spirituality and the life path openly. I am someone not formally aligned with any religion or church, and as a consequence I’ve acutely felt the lack of opportunity to talk very much about spirituality in my daily life. In secular circles (even those that dabble in superficial spiritual conventions) discussions of personal spirituality are often seen as being akin to trying to describe a dream to someone—in other words, something assumed to be both impossible to communicate in any meaningful way and, essentially, unreal.
And I think we treat the life path the same way—we transactionally put it into a bucket with questions like, "What do you do?" without any level of deeper curiosity about what makes the person we are talking with tick, what gets them up in the morning. Status conversations are more common than essence conversations.
So, my journey. Let's talk about that.
It's rarely easy for me to describe this spiritual journey. I have met those for whom spiritual guidance seems to come in a torrent—their life is full of signs, symbols, indicators. I have met others (too many others) for whom the cosmos appears completely silent. Perhaps they have one or two profound life moments that they can't explain or account for with a secular worldview, but their general reluctance to see the universe as anything other than an inert system prevents them from connecting to anything outside their own material circumstances.
I’ve found myself somewhere in the middle. The universe is extremely parsimonious with the meaning it gives me. I might get something that truly lights the next stretch of my journey every six months, every year, or, often, much, much longer.
But over the years I’ve come to appreciate the singular focus, patience, and resolution that this parsimony demands of me. When I get meaning from the universe, I try to hold onto it for dear life.
There's a line in the latest season of Succession where Connor Roy—the buffoonish, unloved first child of the misanthropic media magnate Logan Roy—says to his more successful siblings, "The good thing about having a family that doesn't love you is you learn to live without it. You're all chasing after Dad saying 'Love me, please love me. I need love. I need attention.' You're needy love sponges. And I'm a plant that grows on rocks and lives off insects that die inside of me."
I related to this line, not because I feel this way about love (I’m definitely more on the “needy love sponge” side of the spectrum, another realization for another day), but because I feel this way about meaning and purpose. “Dead insects” might be a little too rude an image to describe the signposts the universe provides me, but I would be lying if I said that those signposts weren’t more often challenging and raw than not.
But we’ll get to all of that.
There’s another meta observation I should make on my experience of spirituality. I have what feel like two orientations on this experience.
There are those things that have spoken to my mind: these are the intellectual bedrock, the foundations that inform the particular, peculiar way I view the world. These have established themselves early on in my life, and get inflected and built on top of but don’t fundamentally change—I have the intellectual foundation of spiritual thought that I have, and I can’t imagine that ever changing over the duration of my remaining life.
Then there are those things that have spoken to my heart. This is anything and everything else—joys, depressions, heartbreaks, synchronicities, anxieties, loves, disconnections, fulfillments, friendships, enmities, hopes, dreams. Impressions, signs, mysteries.
The best way I can relate these two is that the mind has conceptualized the furthest fundamental destination of the spiritual path I walk down. But it is what speaks to my heart that tells me what direction to walk down to get there, how quickly, who to walk the path with on the way, etcetera.
And, I suppose, it was what spoke to my heart at a young, early age that forced my mind to make sense of my path. The mind appears to hold the reins, but the heart ultimately calls the truly important shots.
Where did it all begin, then?
When I first wrote this piece, it was the mind that piped up first. The mind, of course, has already fashioned a clearer and cleverer story than the heart has over the course of my life. This is the mind’s business, after all—telling stories. But after getting to the end of that draft, after charting the course of my intellectual experience of my spirituality from my youngest years through to my early adulthood, I felt a deep dissatisfaction. I wasn’t starting where I was supposed to be starting. I was silencing the real authority on this topic—the heart. All throughout, when matters of the heart came up, saying “we’ll get to all that”.
But those matters of the heart are prior to the matters of the mind. The mind came into a world where the heart already had a rich corpus of impressions, a fabric of reality it navigated without philosophy or theology, a fabric of memory the warp and woof of which is rarely looked at closely, but when it is it reveals myriad little impressions, the fundamental threads of my psyche.
Myriad little memories, myriad little threads, myriad little impressions. To any eye but my own, they would appear disconnected, scattershot. But they form a web, glittering points that share this one decisive discernible commonality: they are simply the first things that come to mind when I meditate on this theme.
There was the wetland forest behind my childhood backyard, which seemed to me infinite, stretching back so endlessly as to appear a gate into some unknown otherworldly space, some mystical elsewhere, though in reality it was only a few acres and was very clearly bounded by the South Road we constantly drove down to get to town.
There was the death of my grandpa, which we learned about on a confusing late night call. For fifteen minutes we cried, lamenting how he passed so suddenly with no sign of ill-health. I remember I had my hands clasped in a prayer with my head prostrated between knees, sobbing and grieving Grandpa. Then there was the follow-up call, informing us that it was actually Grandma that had died.
There was the shabbily-dressed bearded man with scraggly curly gray locks of hair, who showed up at my grandma’s funeral, who profusely made the sign of the cross at her casket, kneeling and prostrating himself deeply, before finishing off what was left of the cup of the blood of Christ. We joked after that Jesus had shown up for her funeral in the guise of a drunk, and I was still young enough to have a part of me believe it.
I remember seeing Grandpa leaving the church after the funeral, more fragile and heartbroken than I had ever seen him, than I had maybe ever seen anyone ever to this day. My Grandpa, who I loved more purely than any other person on this earth, whose goodness I would swear by more readily than that of any other person on this earth, whose high yipping “yee-hee-hee” of a laugh I would challenge any other laugh to beat in its charm and joy.
There was the inner album art of an Alice In Chains album, with an illustration of a dancing, skeletal woman, an image that disturbed me enough at a young age (in spite of its cartoonish similarity to a Tim Burton character) that I couldn’t sleep for thinking about it for days, maybe weeks, thereafter. The impression of the image meshed with the darkness of the lyrics—“Like the coldest winter chill, heaven besides you, hell within”—to create an inner tornado of emotional confusion and discord. Right then, for some indeterminate period of my adolescent life, maybe days, maybe weeks, maybe months, I decided I wanted to be a priest.
There was the deep blue of Father Dave’s eyes, the parish priest who exuded gentle benevolence. I was a 5th grader freshly converted to Catholicism, after my dad had started reexploring his Italian heritage following the death of his dad. We saw Father Dave once at a Handel’s Messiah concert, and after he left us I told my dad, in total ingenuousness, that I didn’t think Father Dave ever left the church, or could.
There was my father explaining to me what hell is through the idea of the refiner’s fire. What is good, goes to heaven, what is bad, gets refined off and discarded. This impression of hell as an absolute annihilation—a total void where one just gets discarded—eventually came to represent death itself for me, anytime I looked too closely into its void.
Later, on a beach in Jamaica, he explained heaven to me as a place where everywhere gets what they want all the time. And, since this was my favorite cartoon at my ~9 years of age, he explained this in terms of Beavis and Butthead—”if they went to heaven, they would get all the nachos and babes they’d want.” Heaven, to this day, leaves very little impression on me.
There was falling asleep at Handel Messiah concerts. There was bringing copies of Nintendo Power to Sunday mass. There was committing myself to giving up candy for the 40 days of Lent, year after year—succeeding, occasionally making a mistake, but mostly succeeding. I gave up candy for good at ~12 years of age after overhearing my brash archly-Jersey aunt tell my mom at a family gathering, “He’s getting kinda fat, isn’t he?”
There was the Catholic conversion and the classes and the joke I would make to the present day, that I got the "blue light special in the Catholic sacraments department" because in a single year I received the sacraments of baptism, communion, and confirmation, sacraments usually granted at birth, early adolescence, and at the end of high school, respectively.
There was the word on my lips the entire morning after an ayahuasca experience I had in my late 20s: “expression”, the mandate: “express!”
There was the pit of hellish anxiety I fell into on an acid trip at Burning Man in 2016, there was the fear as I tried and failed to sleep that I’d be psychologically damaged forever, would become the crazy old man down by the river, there was getting a Xanax from my friend and passing out and waking up and feeling like nothing ever happened, and going on to laugh and lounge the remaining afternoon in the baking sun at my camp—though not without the distinct impression that I’d been saved in some fundamental way.
There was experiencing my anxiety as a texture of knives on a solo experience with mushrooms in my 30s, marveling, “this is all outside of me”. There was yelling “datta dayadhvam damyata” at the lightning in the rain as a high 17-year-old.
There was looking up at a light in my high school auditorium, and for whatever reason, due to whatever I had been going through immediately prior, I thought to myself, “All is God, God is all”. I had learned the word “pansexual” from a John Waters movie, and I assumed that the root “pan-” could also be applied to “theism”, and started calling myself a “pantheist”, later realizing this word already had a meaning and a history.
There was the ornately framed Latin sheet music parchment sheet I bought in San Francisco in my early 20s at a thrift store for $20. Nearly ten years later, I got it assessed with the help of my alma mater’s department of music and learned that it dates back to 16th century Spain, an introitus to a Latin mass called “Laetetur cor”: “Laetetur cor quaerentium Dominum / quaerite Dominum / et confirmamini”, “Let the hearts that seek the Lord rejoice and be strengthened, always seek his face.” It’s worth something in the range of $400-500.
There was the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign, the hopes of which now seem further away than many of these childhood memories. There is the dream of a simpler self I was back then, meeting the first girl I ever really fell in love with, and right at the point where our feelings struck real heat, a global pandemic was announced and she moved in with me for the next three months, at the very start of our relationship.
There are all the New Yorker articles or School of Life videos that proved reliable sources of synchronicity at key moments I needed guidance in life, like the profile of Samuel Beckett that got me into Zen as a young adult or a video about anxious and avoidant attachments in the dying moments of a fast-burn romantic fling.
There was the tarot reading I got from my dad on the verge of my teenage years. He told me that I’d lose my current set of friends but come to gain a new set—in retrospect, not all that hard to predict that of a kid on the cusp of puberty when everything in your life suddenly changes.
There was the tarot reading I got six months ago in Mexico, which still uncannily seems to describe the road I’ve presently been on.
There are memories of my hometown, flashes that appear in my consciousness. There are streets and school hallways and shopping malls and rooms of my childhood home, homes of my friends. There are experiences of the wide-open fields in my hometown’s local parks, green and green, the moving capaciousness of which came back to me immediately when I read your description of your wide-open rural upbringing, Sam.
There are more and more and more as well, more and more, fractal patterns that appear at every level of life—pulling out, zooming in.
And all throughout, there has existed for me a vague sense of spirit, of God, of divine possibility, of the transcendental, of something higher, of absolute subjectivity or collective intersubjectivity. But any attempt to reach out to grab it, to understand it, to establish a relationship to it, and it flits away. It’s the heart that holds these myriad memories, but the mind is mute when asked to coherently describe what lies behind them.
Maybe that, more than any of the reasons I gave earlier, is what makes this letter exchange challenging for me. My experience of the divine is, on the best days, kaleidoscopic—the moment I focus in on some dimension of my spiritual experience, the moment I try to discern the deeper meaning of it, attempt to communicate directly with it, it disappears, eludes me, turns into air. The colors shift, new colors appear, and whatever I thought I saw is now gone. I can only see the complete web of impressions that these fragments show up within—any attempt to focus on one small part of it, and my focus grows hazy and confused. Any attempt to name that broader web, and it goes inert, lifeless.
Which is maybe what also makes this letter exchange so appropriately themed for me, Sam. Because as it turns out, the experience I have of purpose, solely and only, is what gives me a sense of stable spiritual ballast. Any attempt of mine to name the higher force feels like a broad and empty placeholder, woefully incomplete. But I do feel like I can name and articulate the purpose that higher force has demanded of me, even if doing justice to that naming and articulating (much less the acting and fulfilling on) may take me my whole life.
And that’s where the mind comes in. How it has made sense of all these different clues, all these breadcrumbs of impressions left for me by the universe. How it has made sense of the world it lives in, as a whole, the challenges and struggles of which go far deeper than my own personal fate. How it has made sense of that imperative of purpose.
The great thing about this letter series, Sam—we can take our time. Get to each story, each dimension, each chapter as we’ve called to do so. My spiritual heart has responded repeatedly to so much of the experience you related—the divine you sensed in the wide-open natural presence of your rural upbringing, your teenage descent into first confusion and then outright darkness, the glimmer of dawn of your brother’s faith. And this heart of mine also demanded that it speak first in my reply to you, and rightly so. The mind will get its turn, next.
But for now, Sam, I am eager to hear the next turn in your story—how you ultimately traversed the path following your second waypoint and your brother’s conversion. What did it feel like to be pulled out of your darker depths by God—and what did it look like to set forth on your continued journey with that renewed faith powering you forward?
Until next time,
JG
Images created by Midjourney.
An amazing look into your journey, JG. Thank you for sharing. :) Looking forward to continuing our exchange!